(Lost
at sea, April 10, 1963)
I stand on the ledge
where rock runs into the river
As the night turns
brackish with morning, and mourn the drowned.
Here the sea is diluted
with river; I watch it slaver
Like a dog curing of
rabies. Its ravening over,
Lickspittle ocean nuzzles
the dry ground.
(But the dream that
woke me was worse than the sea's gray
Slip-slap; there are
no such sounds by day.)
This crushing of
people is something we live with.
Daily, by unaccountable
whim
Or caught up in some
harebrained scheme of death,
Tangled in cars, dropped
from the sky, in flame,
Men and women break
the pledge of breath:
And now under water,
gone all jetsam and small
In the pressure of
oceans collected, a squad of brave men in a hull.
(Why can't our dreams
be content with the terrible facts?
The only animal cursed
with responsible sleep.
We trace disaster always
to our own acts.
I met a monstrous self
trapped in the black deep:
All these years,
he smiled, I've drilled at sea
For this crush of
water. Then he saved only me.)
We invest ships
with life. Look at the harbor
At first light: with
better grace than men
In their movements
the vessels run to their labors
Working the fields
that the tide has made green again;
Their beauty is womanly,
they are named for ladies and queens,
Although by a wise
superstition these are called
After fish, the finned
boats, silent and submarine.
The crushing of any
ship has always been held
In dread, like a house
burned or a great tree felled.
I think how sailors
laugh, as if cold and wet
And dark and lost were
their private, funny derision
And I can judge then
what dark compression
Astonishes them now,
their sunken faces set
Unsmiling, where the
contents sluice to and fro
And without humor,
somewhere northeast of here and below.
(Sea-brothers,
I lower you in the ingenuity of dreams,
Strange lungs and
bells to escape in; let me stay aboard last-
We amend our dreams
in half-sleep. There it seems
Easy to talk to the
severe dead and explain the past.
Now they are saying,
Do not be ashamed to stay alive,
You have dreamt
nothing that we do not forgive.
And gentlier, Study
something deeper than yourselves,
As, how the heart,
when it turns diver, delves and saves.)
Whether we give
assent to this or rage
Is a question of temperment
and does not matter.
Some will has been
done past our understanding,
Past our guilt surely,
equal to our fears.
Dullards, we set again
to the cryptic blank page
Where the sea schools
us with terrible water.
The noise of a boat
breaking up and its men is in our ears.
The bottom here is
too far down for our sounding;
The ocean was salt
before we crawled to tears.
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